Doug Casey on the Deep State

By Nick Giambruno

July 28, 2016

I recently sat down with Casey Research founder Doug Casey to discuss this. Doug is a former classmate of Bill Clinton and has met him several times, including once at the White House.

Nick Giambruno: There is a popular conception that only the “best and brightest” go into government. I think this is a sacred cow that needs to be slaughtered. What’s your take, Doug?

Doug Casey: It’s a real problem when a pernicious myth subverts reality. Everybody believes that the institution of government is like Camelot—a wise ruler assisted by noble paladins. Maybe that meme gained traction in recent times with John Kennedy and his good-looking wife, Jackie. They looked like an ideal couple. They weren’t. But they were a lot better than what followed for the next 50 years…

The fact is that the high levels of government do get people with high IQs. They can pass tests. They’re skilled at manipulating both laws and people. But they tend to be of a low moral character, number one. Number two, despite their high IQs, they’re actually quite stupid. Let me explain these things.

From a moral point of view, there are two types of people in the world. People who believe in coercion when dealing with their fellow humans. And people who believe in dealing voluntarily with their fellow humans.

The government is a force. The essence of government is coercion. So, people attracted to it are necessarily the wrong kind of people, coercion-oriented people. Government draws much more than its share of criminal personalities.

And they’re not the most intelligent people—completely contrary to common belief. It’s because one sign of intelligence is not just seeing the immediate and direct consequences of an action—any intelligent six-year-old can usually do that. It’s seeing the indirect and delayed consequences of actions. They’re very bad at that.

Almost everything government does, certainly relative to the economy, creates distortions and misallocations of capital. Their inflation of the currency discourages saving and creates the business cycle. Their taxes and regulations destroy capital. Their actions are almost purely destructive of society. This reminds me of one definition of stupidity—it’s an unwitting tendency to self-destruction. So, people in government are not “the best and the brightest.”

Everybody should purge these false memes about the state and its employees from their mind and look at reality as opposed to what they’ve been told is a reality.

The problem is compounded by the fact that television and movies generally portray government officials as noble, thoughtful and virtuous. But this is a completely false impression. Almost an alternate reality. They’re generally not that way. Prosecuting attorneys, for instance, tend to be much more interested in collecting scalps for their self-advancement than they are in justice. Cops have been transformed from peace officers into law enforcement officers.

Frontline cops on the beat used to use common sense in keeping the peace; that was their job. But that’s becoming less and less the case; they’re now, instead, mostly charged with enforcing a myriad of arbitrary laws. More than in the past, the wrong kind of people are going into policing now. They’re guys who have an extra Y chromosome. Most are now ex-military, who have picked up a lot of bad habits in the government’s numerous foreign adventures.

Nick Giambruno: This kind of thinking—that government employees are naturally good, virtuous people—appears to have even infected Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate for president, who, unfortunately, is no Ron Paul. He recently called Hillary Clinton “a wonderful public servant.”

You were talking about how there are two types of people, those who favor voluntarism and those who favor coercion. For me, at least, Johnson has muddied the waters on where he is exactly.

Doug Casey: Regarding Johnson, I don’t know what his philosophical beliefs, if any, are. The only thing that I think I know about him is that he wants to see pot legalized on a national scale. Well, bravo. I’m all for that, even though I’m not a toker. It’s a step in the right direction toward dismantling the insane War on Some Drugs. But does he have any other libertarian tendencies? He doesn’t seem to have a grasp of the basic principles… although he seems better than the average politician. But that’s not saying much.

I’m especially concerned about his running mate, William Weld, who’s an actual neocon. He’s an overt statist, an active promoter of warfare, welfare, taxes and regulations. He has no libertarian tendencies at all that I’m aware of. I mean, he’s a pure Deep State guy.

It appears that the Libertarian Party has been captured by the Republicans, which is surprisingly clever on the Republicans’ part. Now they have two parties that are registered in all 50 states. It’s kind of a backup system to the regular Republican Party. They’ll need a backup since the old GOP is a dead duck.

One thing you’ve got to say about the Democratic Party is that, while their ideas are destructive and evil, at least they’re more honest about them than the Republicans are on their own. Democrats make no bones about being the party of socialism, and they naturally attract the envy-driven, the class warriors, the politically correct, the cultural Marxists, the gender Nazis and the like. The Democratic Party is beyond redemption.

The Republicans attract a different group. Religious people. Cultural traditionalists. People who generally favor what they think is the free market. They tend to be much more nationalistic and pro-military than the Democrats. But, unlike the Dems, the Reps have no real philosophical foundation.

The Democrats can be viewed as the evil party and the Republicans as the stupid party. But they’re really just two sides of the same coin, at least when it comes to their leadership—they’re all Deep State members. The Libertarians once had a claim to being the party of principle, back in the days when people like John Hospers, Harry Browne, and Ron Paul were their candidates. But now, the Libertarians can be viewed, at best, as the smart wing of the stupid party. It’s a sad testimony to the nature of politics…

With a little bit of luck, Trump will end up destroying the Republican Party, which is held together by chewing gum and bailing wire. Its disparate elements have very little in common with each other. The neocons, the evangelical Christians, the social conservatives and people who think they support the free market are there only for lack of a better alternative. They really have nothing in common except a dislike of the Democratic Party.

Although I suspect Trump will win, I expect the Republican Party itself will blow up. The situation is not unlike that before the War Between the States. Very unstable.

Nick Giambruno: Speaking of all this, I have to ask you about the Clintons. Bill Clinton was your former classmate in college. What was your impression?

Doug Casey: He’s one of the most charming people you could ever meet. When you talk to him, even if the room is full of people trying to get his attention, when he looks at you and talks to you, he makes you feel like you’re the only person in existence. He’s that good. He’s got a lot of interpersonal skills.

I met him when he was campaigning for president of the class at Georgetown. I never ran with the same group he did, but he was knocking at everybody’s door and that’s how I first met him. And then I met him again at our 25th class reunion, which he held at the White House.

I was shocked that when I walked up to him—and there must have been 400 people at the reunion—and I don’t know how, or even if, he saw my name tag—but when I said, “Hey, Bill, how are you?” he responded with, “Hey, Doug, it’s good to see you.” He’s a super pro.

Despite Bill’s charm, the Clintons are essentially criminal personalities. I’m not just talking about the $100,000 bribe Hillary got for supposedly trading cattle in the old days; now, she wouldn’t even walk across the street for that little. From the earliest days, starting with the strange death of Vince Foster, and then the strange death of Ron Brown, there are a lot of strange deaths that have surrounded the Clintons. They may well have gotten away with murder, quite frankly.

I think there are about 75 separate reasons why there should have been a full-scale investigation by the FBI in the strange death of Vince Foster. I wish there were some agency that was not part of the government that could investigate crimes, which is part of the problem, of course. The FBI is really just an overrated, bloated, politically-driven bureaucracy. I sincerely doubt, for instance, that they’ll ever go after The Clinton Foundation, which is clearly nothing but a gigantic slush fund.

The other thing I noticed at the reunion—and several of us noticed this—is that Hillary was sitting there with five or six really good-looking, young female velociraptors arrayed around her. Some classmates and I looked at each other and remarked that it was unusual for her to have all these good-looking young chicks around her. And, of course, since then, there have been rumors that she’s an aggressive lesbian. I have no other facts to back that up except for this one instance.

I’ve got to say, I couldn’t care less about Bill’s or Hillary’s, or anybody else’s personal sexual habits. As far as I’m concerned, that’s nobody’s business but theirs, and it’s got nothing to do with anything. But it’s interesting, for what it’s worth.

Nick Giambruno: I agree. I think focusing on their personal lives is a distraction from their real malfeasance. So, let’s talk about that.

Probably the most objectionable thing I find about Hillary is her reckless promotion of war.

I think she advocated for just about every conflict the U.S. has gotten involved with in the past 30 years, most of which have been unmitigated disasters.

She’s an ardent supporter of arming the so-called moderate Syrian rebels and toppling Bashar Al-Assad.

She’s supported the regime change in Ukraine.

She backed the surge in Afghanistan, which, predictably, accomplished exactly nothing.

She was the deciding factor in pushing Bill to bomb Serbia in the 1990s.

She infamously voted for the 2003 Iraq invasion.

And, of course, she was one of the main pushers of the NATO intervention in Libya that toppled Muammar Gaddafi. After rebels gruesomely executed Gaddafi—they reportedly sodomized him with a bayonet—Hillary said on national TV, “We came, we saw, he died.” It’s sort of a sociopathic spin on “Veni, vidi, vici,” a famous saying from Julius Caesar, the Roman leader, which means “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

These are just some examples off the top of my head. She has apparently learned nothing—or the completely wrong lessons—from this trail of disasters. She’s an unrepentant warmonger. And I think the odds of WWIII breaking out will be much higher under a Hillary presidency.

One nugget from Hillary’s email scandal, known as the Blumenthal Memo, basically disclosed that the real reason NATO wanted to go after Gaddafi was not a desire to bring freedom, democracy, and unicorns to the Libyan people, but because NATO feared that Gaddafi would use his vast gold reserves to back a currency that would displace a version of the French franc that is used in Central and Western Africa.

After NATO-backed rebels toppled Gaddafi, plans for the gold-backed currency, along with the gold itself, vanished like a double cheeseburger placed in front of Chris Christie.

Strangely, this damning piece of information from her emails barely gets a peep in the mass media narrative.

Doug Casey: You’re absolutely right, because the media itself is part of the Deep State. They all are educated in the same universities by professors with horrible values and taught the same things. They go to the same clubs. They socialize with each other. They have the same basic psychological, political, economic and philosophical underpinnings. So, of course, they look at the world through the same lens. And avoid mention of things that might be inconvenient or conflict with their worldview.

And as far as Gaddafi, sure, he was a criminal. Can you name a head of state, certainly in the third world, who’s not? He was not a nice guy, but, as these people go, he was better than most. Assad in Syria is much the same. It’s hard not to be brutal when your job description is to hold together an artificial non-country with dozens of different religions, ethnic groups, and fanatical political factions—all of them anxious to take over the government so they can steal and massacre rivals, including yourself. Mother Teresa would have started acting like a thug if you put her in charge of one of these places. Of course, these people are all demonized—unless they’re stooges of Washington. But even that is dangerous—as Saddam Hussein, once a BFF of the U.S.—discovered. Vladimir Putin is another example of somebody who’s been made into the devil incarnate.

Nick Giambruno: Well, Hillary has basically said Putin is the new Hitler.

Doug Casey: It’s an amazingly stupid statement, in addition to being inaccurate. I mean, it’s almost like these people want to start some version of World War III. And they may succeed. It’s really very scary.

It could happen with China in the East or the South China Seas. It could happen accidentally with Syria. It could happen with the breakaway provinces in Ukraine. There are a lot of trip wires. I’m pleased to be spending a lot of time in Cafayate, among the horses and grapevines of Argentina, where I can watch this stuff on my widescreen, at least somewhat insulated from what might happen…

Reprinted with permission from Doug Casey’s International Man.

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